For Tourists, Statue of Liberty is Nice, but no Forever 21

The Statue of Liberty, New York icon and well-trod tourist destination, is seeing a surge in visitors lately — up nearly 10% by recent estimates — thanks in part to the opening of the statue’s crown after a long closure following the Sept. 11 attacks.

But that surge is small compared to the tsunami of shoppers, many of them tourists, pouring into the new Forever 21 megastore, which opened last week in Times Square. As The Journal reported, the store expects to attract 100,000 visitors daily — far more than the daily average of 14,000 people who visited the Statue of Liberty last July.

That month, many tourists came to see the statue, at least in part due to the re-opening of the landmark’s crown. This summer, evening cruises to Liberty Island, are a hot ticket, the National Park Service said.

Last year tourism in New York fell by 3.9% year-over-year, but roughly 3.2 million people, most of them tourists, visited Lady Liberty, according to the National Park Service. Head count at the landmark has increased steadily since 2006.

For the 11-month period ending in May 2010, the number of people visiting the statue increased over the same time period a year earlier by close to 10%, or roughly 300,000 people, for a total of about 2.8 million. Roughly 85,000 people visited the statue’s crown during those months — 15,000 fewer than the estimated daily traffic at Forever 21.